Remember, ladies… practice your anti-rape face in the mirror

Diligent activists on the nation’s college campuses continue to work on the scourge of sexual assaults and helping young women find ways to prepare themselves and protect against…

On second thought, stop. I just can’t do this any more. The heck with it. Here’s the latest.

College Tells Female Students to Practice Their Anti-Rape Faces in the Mirror

There are a lot of ways to address sexual assault on college campuses. Warning students to watch the facial expressions they make isn’t one of them.

Yet that’s what students at Ramapo College of New Jersey in Mahwah, New Jersey, were faced with during an hourlong presentation on alcohol use and sexual assault that focused heavily on what women could do to avoid being assaulted, according to the Ramapo News.

The presentation included tips from the school’s Substance Abuse & Violence Prevention coordinator Cory Rosenkranz, who advised students on how to dress, how much to drink and how to use body language that would lessen the chances of assault.

We all know that there are monsters lurking in our society. We wish it were otherwise, but humans are complex creatures and we produce some defective ones with depressing regularity. Some of these monsters act out their twisted tendencies as sexual predators. Certainly we need to be on guard against them at all times. And yes, occasionally an actual rapist will show up on a college campus. By all means, we need to find them, stop them and lock them away. And there are women who have been raped by these subhuman cretins, and others in danger of having it happen in the future. They need our help and our protection. But as Stephen said, an actual rapist doesn’t care about how you are dressed or what signals you are sending or what sort of look you have on your face. They are criminals. That’s not going to change them. What will help is taking common sense precautions about staying in populated, well lit, SAFE areas. Keep your wits about you and travel in groups where possible. Don’t take stupid chances. Arm yourself to whatever extent is legally possible and comfortable for you. Learn to defend yourself and be as prepared as is possible for the worst case scenario.

But, again, we’re only talking about a vanishingly small number of men out of the general population, thank God. Then there are the other 99.999% of the men in the country who do not, would not and will not rape any women. Some of the younger ones make up roughly half of the student body on all of the nation’s non-single gender campuses. With youthful hormones in full bloom and the new found freedom of being away from their parents for the first time as adults, they will occasionally say inappropriate things. They may stare too long at attractive young ladies. Sometimes they will misread signals and try to hold more than your hand if they think you are in the mood for such activities. But if they are men, they will stop when you tell them to. Still, they will make all manner of clumsy moves in ham handed attempts to entice some of you young ladies into being their girlfriends, frequently with hilarious, spectacularly unsuccessful results. (Trust me on this.)

They are not rapists. They are not sexual predators. They are not the enemy. They are, by and large, a group of confused man – child creatures who have spent nearly every waking minute since they hit puberty dreaming of having a girlfriend and stumblingly working out ideas to do so like Wile E. Coyote, enjoying varying degrees of success (or more often failure) in these efforts. If you got to know them, you might actually like some of them.

Now run along to your next seminar. You’re giving me a splitting headache.